Tag Archives: fennesz

Savoy - See the beauty in your drab hometown

There has always been a tension in Waaktaar-Savoy’s music between a quest for dramatic intensity and a need to rely on easier emotions induced in a melancholic sense of unrecognized beauty. See the beauty in your drab hometown is an album that shines from various lights, sometimes glowing like a nocturnal sun, sometimes glimmering like a candle in plain daylight, as it is surely intended to do with such an album-title. While there are unique achievements, in the end you get the sense that more could have been made of such material, with more time devoted to it. The paradox of making a diverse album of less than 40 minutes is that some of the songs would have deserve more space to fully explore their potential. The quality of many of the songs here make you hope that there is more artistry to come, and not just songs useful for different occasions this time, but a true, immersive, album experience - of the ones that make you perceive differently the air, the world, your loved ones, or your drab hometown.

When
Norwegian legendary pop trio a-ha disbanded in 2010, it was unclear what prime
songwriter Pål Waaktaar-Savoy – who never hid the fact that he did not want the band
to stop – would come up with next. Would he rekindle his other band Savoy, which
he started with his wife Lauren Waaktaar-Savoy and drummer Frode Unneland in
1995 (after having reached Mark Hollis, hoping to start a band with him as a singer, as it is stated in Tårer fra en stein, the recently published book by Ørjan Nilsson based on interviews with Waaktaar-Savoy), when a-ha was on hiatus, and continued up until 2007 in parallel with a
reformed a-ha, releasing five albums and a career-retrospective best-of? Or would
he start a brand new project from scratch, solo or with other musicians, as he
seemed to be willing to at the time?